Thomas Manger inherited a force in crisis when he became chief of the U.S. Capitol Police four years ago. He’s now leaving a force under a microscope.
The 70-year-old law enforcement veteran came out of retirement just months after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol — tasked with stabilizing a department whose officers had been physically and emotionally battered and whose protective mission had suddenly grown immensely more complicated.
But that was only the beginning of challenge for Manger, who soon found himself holding one of the most politicized jobs in all of policing. Within months, an alternative narrative about Jan. 6 took hold on the right, and with many of its proponents now in power in Washington — including President Donald Trump — he has had to strike a careful balance between standing up for his officers and heeding the lawmakers who oversee and fund his department.
“I don’t think it’s wise or necessary or useful to try and convince members of Congress what to think,” Manger said. “I think you make the compelling argument about what the Capitol Police need, about what the Capitol Police require to do their jobs and allow them to make a decision.”
That’s not to say Manger has been silent. He has spoken out at key junctures, criticizing Trump’s blanket pardons of Jan. 6 offenders and, just last week, the Justice Department’s decision to move toward a $5 million settlement with the family of Ashli Babbit — the Jan. 6 rioter who was shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer while trying to storm a room off the House floor.
But in a wide-ranging interview Tuesday — amid his last week on the job before retiring for good — Manger said it wasn’t productive for the embattled force’s chief to be snarled in political fights on the Hill, or in the larger war over the memory of the Capitol insurrection.
While Manger has felt compelled to speak up about situations that directly affect his officers, he has taken pains to stay out of other battles. He again called the pardons “an absolute slap in the face to police officers, frankly, all over this country” Tuesday, for instance, but refused to weigh in on the fate of a bronze plaque commemorating the officers who responded to the riot.
Congress ordered the fabrication of the memorial and its installation “at a permanent location on the western front of the United States Capitol” in March 2022. The plaque was cast, inscribed with “THEIR HEROISM WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN,” but after Republicans won the House majority the following November, it was put into storage in the Capitol basement.
Calling it a “very political issue,” Manger said he has not spoken to Republican congressional leaders about the plaque and declined to call for it to be installed. He said he had not seen the actual memorial, just a photograph.
“I hope they will find some middle ground,” he said. “There’s not a lot of memorials that are attached to the Capitol building, but there are certainly a lot of informational pedestals where you have little historical briefings around the campus.”
The tap dance reflects the enormous challenges of managing a department that is ultimately responsible to a web of overlapping overseers. There’s the three-member Capitol Police Board, four oversight committees and senior congressional leaders themselves — all of whom have influence over the department and how it operates.
Manger — who previously led the departments in Montgomery County, Maryland, and Fairfax County, Virginia — said dealing with the menagerie of Capitol Hill power centers was “very different” from reporting to a single elected executive and “very, very challenging.”
That, he said, has required a focus on the future of the Capitol Police and securing what the department needs to keep lawmakers, tourists and staff safe. It’s also a situation that will hang over whoever replaces Manger as chief.
“If they pick someone from the inside, they’re going to know what our mission is,” Manger said. “They’ll have that — that’s good. If they pick somebody from the outside, they’re going to have to learn about our mission, the uniqueness of it, but the structure of oversight as well, and there is a learning curve there.”
An even bigger challenge for the force, however, has been keeping up with a rising tide of threats against lawmakers. The department reported more than 9,400 in 2024, and a good number of those threats were deemed credible enough to require temporary protective details for rank-and-file lawmakers who otherwise would not be entitled to them.
That has stretched resources thin, Manger said: “We’re always robbing Peter to pay Paul to put that together. We should have the staffing to do those kinds of details.”
Manger recently made his final budget requests to Congress, asking lawmakers for $967.8 million for fiscal 2026, a 22 percent boost over the current funding level which was set in fiscal 2024. He acknowledged in hearings with appropriators that for his department’s size — about 2,300 sworn officers and civilians — a budget approaching a billion dollars is enormous. He stressed the sweeping intelligence, security and nationwide coordination mandate of the Capitol Police.
Both the Trump administration and Republicans on Capitol Hill are trying to rein in federal spending, and lawmakers tasked with spending are expected to begin writing their bills in the coming weeks. The outgoing chief warned against continuing to keep funding flat for the department he’s set to exit long before any spending deal is reached.
“It would impact our ability to address the growing number of threats against a member of Congress,” Manger said. “We’d just be crossing our fingers and saying, ‘Well, hope nothing happens,’ because there’s more that we think we can do if we had the resources.”
The job of choosing Manger’s replacement will fall to the Capitol Police Board, comprised of House Sergeant-at-Arms William McFarland, Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Jennifer Hemingway and Architect of the Capitol Thomas Austin. Top congressional leaders choose those officials and are expected to have some influence in the pick.
Manger said that anyone coming in after him has to know that the job has a much different mandate and set of responsibilities than a municipal police department. He said he would be available as a sounding board but was looking forward to retirement — some consulting work, maybe, and finally fixing the fence in his yard.
“One of the things that I really, truly want to get away from is the aggravations of being a police chief,” he said. “So whatever I do, it’s going to be something I want to do.”
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